[NBLUG/talk] More hard drive problems

[Christopher Wagner]

Well, bad blocks are something I would consider to legitimately fail a
drive.  From my experience, if a drive starts out with a few bad blocks,
most of the time the number of bad blocks grows steadily.  In a
production system, such as a NetApp file server, any drive that has a
bad block immediately gets removed and replaced and the drive is 1)
scrapped, 2) put into a computer with non-critical data (ie: has Windoze
installed), or 3) returned to manufacturer for replacement.  I simply
can't trust a drive that shows a higher risk of failure.

We just recently had an issue here with a hard disk on one of our
database servers, some potential bad blocks, I got the data off
promptly, pulled the drive, and replaced it.  I didn't even bother
running a bad block scan on it.  The drive was potentially faulty and I
just didn't want to waste my time, or company time trying to deal with
it.  Probably saved us *a lot* of money by just simply replacing the drive.

- Chris

Dean A. Roman wrote:

>
> FYI: 
>    Network Appliance, after I returned a failed 15K SCSI drive, once
> told me that 30% of their returned failed drives really aren't broken
> at all but the system just reports then as failed because of
> corruption and/or bad blocks and/or data errors.
>
> Thanks,
>     ---Dean.
>
>
>
> Walter Hansen wrote:
>
>>Not related at all, but of hard drive interest.
>>
>>I picked up some IBM/Hitachi 80g 7200rpm drives at HSC the other day and
>>they were really quiet. I was very supprised. They were rather quite
>>sitting on a desk filling up with backups. I doubt I'll be able to hear
>>them at all inside a case.
>>
>>
>>  
>>
>>>On Monday 03 October 2005 06:18 pm, Lincoln Peters wrote:
>>>    
>>>
>>>>However, I ran Maxtor's PowerMax utility on the hard disk earlier today,
>>>>and it was able to somehow repair the problem (!).
>>>>      
>>>>
>>>Cancel that; although it passed every test I ran on it (both from PowerMax
>>>and
>>>from Linux), it won't hold a partition table.  I tried creating one using
>>>cfdisk, saved it, and aside from a cryptic kernel message (which
>>>disappeared
>>>quickly and doesn't seem to appear in the kernel logs), it appeared to
>>>save
>>>correctly.  However, since the kernel message made me suspicious, I
>>>reopened
>>>the disk using cfdisk, and it reported NO PARTITION TABLE.
>>>
>>>Looks like I'll be giving Maxtor customer service a call tomorrow!
>>>
>>>
>>>--
>>>Lincoln Peters
>>><sampln at sbcglobal.net>
>>>
>>>Beware of low-flying butterflies.
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>>    
>>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>  
>>
>
>-- 
>Dean A. Roman
>
>  
>
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